The outcomes of the Perseverance Rover’s initial seven Mars oxygen-generating missions were made public by NASA. The runs were completed by the rover’s Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment and took place from February 2021 to the end of 2021 during its first year on the red planet (MOXIE). MOXIE, which was created in collaboration with MIT, functions by consuming carbon dioxide and generating oxygen. The gadget is roughly the size of a car battery, but NASA predicts that a future iteration would be 100 times bigger.
About 95% of the Martian atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide, giving Perseverance enough to work with when producing oxygen. The amount of oxygen produced by MOXIE during its first seven runs was roughly 6g per hour. The researchers were able to increase that rate in a more recent run—eleventh—to MOXIE’s around 10.5 g per hour or about half the amount required for human survival.
The team was able to increase production due to the current Mars circumstances. The planet is currently experiencing its winter, which is characterised by chilly evenings and comparatively high atmospheric pressures, resulting in the year’s highest air density. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means MOXIE can produce more oxygen.
However, MOXIE’s primary objective is not to facilitate Mars human breathing. As an alternative, NASA hopes to employ MOXIE’s technology to produce enough rocket fuel to send a human crew of between four and six people into space. This will require the equipment to produce 2 to 3 kg of oxygen every hour.
Currently, MOXIE’s power source is one of its biggest drawbacks. Around 25 kilowatts of power will be needed to produce kilogrammes of oxygen every hour, but Perseverance only generates approximately 100 watts for MOXIE to consume. Only 10% of that energy is used to produce oxygen; the remainder is required to drive the air compressor, the device’s electronics, and other things.
At MIT’s Haystack Observatory, Michael Hecht, the mission’s main investigator, said: “The only thing we haven’t proved is running at dawn or dark when the temperature is changing significantly.” We do have a trick up the sleeves that will enable us to do that, and after we test it in the lab, we can accomplish that last goal to demonstrate that we can actually run at any time. If the system can function well despite turning on and off numerous times, it is possible that a larger system that is intended to run continuously could do so for a great number of hours.
